So I went overseas recently and wanted to have access to my iphone for emergencies and any business calls that might come through while I was out of the country, so I signed up for AT&T’s international roaming plan for both voice and text messaging as well as data usage. It’s a combined price of $31 which I figured would be cheaper than what I’d pay without the plan for roaming (even though I didn’t plan on using the phone much at all).
However, now that I’m back home, and called to cancel the plan, AT&T suggests that I keep the plan on for 3 months because sometimes the international carriers’ billing can take that long to get through the system, and if a bill comes in and I’ve turned the plan off, I will be billed at the non-plan international roaming rate. So, I only needed the service for 3 weeks, but I’ve got to pay for 3 months?
I explained to the agent that surely, if a bill comes through from a foreign country, and I am clearly not in that foreign country currently, that they would be able to see the date of usage and see that I did have the international plan at that time and everything would be good, right?
Wrong. “It is part of the terms and conditions on the international plan that billing may take up to 90 days to show up on your account, so we suggest that you keep the plan on your phone until you no longer see charges coming through.” You’ve got to be kidding me?! WTF?!?!?!
I think I used 5MB of the 20MB data plan that I bought, but I have to pay for 3 months of the plan, “just in case”?!?! Total scam. I shut it off and figure I’ll deal with escalating the issue if something shows up on later bills. Soooooo lame.
Oh, and While I’m talking about AT&T…I have 5,000 rollover minutes and I never use all the minutes in my plan, so I wanted to lower my plan to the next lower minute plan. Guess what? You loose all your rollover minutes when you switch plans. Gee, imagine that?
No surprise, cell phones are all about scams, surveilence, tracking, etc… they are sold/used more for OTHERS use than your own use.
What happened to old fashioned companies providing “goods and services”. Oh yeah, that’s gone! This is the NEW America basking in the sunlight of Globalization.
Consumer Wars coming soon to a town near you!